Posts tagged social media ast SXSW

SXSW was a frenzy of new ideas, exciting innovations and awesome friends. I wanted to share highlights from a wonderful panel discussion hosted by Robin Carey of Social Media Today. It was a cerebral download of current social media best practices and issues featuring Whole Foods, Siemens, IBM and MasterCard. Here are 25 highlights:

2) “We embed social media inside our processes. Let’s look at our processes and see how we can enhance them with social.”

3) “If all you did to improve your commercial presence was to train your sales people on the importance of influencers … how much more effective could they be?”

4) “We have a constantly-changing portfolio of social media experiments. The first time we tried applying social technologies in a customer service department it became the most productive department in the company.”

5) “In just 200 tweets we can assess and identify 52 different personality traits of a customer. We ran an analysis over 500,000 people and we really nailed this. Think of providing this powerful insight to a retailer. We can see what they value, not just what they are buying. We have found a 40-45% increase in sales when you recommend upsales based on values instead of past buying behavior.”

6) “Some CEO’s feel like if the ‘opt out of social’ they are somehow protected. That is just crazy.”

7) “Security is a big concern on the social web. People are going to try to destroy social media just like they are trying to breach data in other areas.”

8) “The number one use case for social media among our customers is around innovation – innovating with employees and with customers. For most businesses this is going to deliver the highest ROI.”

9) “We have our own internal version of Klout. We do rate people in this way – their effectiveness on social media. Tying social into a performance measurement works. The productivity of a sales who has an effective social media presence is 3x an employee who is not active on the web.”

13) “As long as we are not showing the real value of this effort in the language and terms of the business, we’re just teenage social media gurus generating Facebook Likes.”

14) “To drive employee adoption, you need to give them a message to rally around. Something to inspire and create pride. And then you need to take down the internal rules that stifle engagement and creativity.”

15) “We are in era of content pollution. We need to go beyond the world of filling the world with shit content and step back and listen to people and see what we’re really doing to them out there.”

16) “Curating and sharing something meaningful, driving participation — that’s where we need to go. Once we stopped shouting and started creating targeted, meaningful communication, we saw a 400% increase in engagement.”

17) “Look at content exchanges with customers. Use data and content to earn trust by being helpful and informative.”

18) “We need to get beyond ‘click accept.’ We need to have loud voice and encourage our customers to think about what they are doing, where the limits are. If we don’t, we will have practices driven by fear and invite regulation.”

19) “Do you have the right data? If you have bad data you will get bad answers.”

20) “Creating a social enterprise with hourly employees is incredibly hard. There are labor laws, policies to deal with, personalities and people that are always churning. You always have to wonder, is this a person helping us with social or are they just texting their friends?”

21) “Company culture is the hardest part of the puzzle. After that it is just policy and procedures and that is pretty easy to solve.”

22) “We are always striving to make social customer data real and meaningful at the store level. We spend a lot of time on internal infographics to help explain what we do and why this is important. It’s not just about data. This still takes some human care and insight to make it work.”

23) “Business is about service to our customers. If you don’t put that value first in everything we do, including your presence, your, measurement, and analytics you are lost.”

24) “Getting buy-in for social from the C-suite is usually not so difficult. It is the next level of management who present the biggest challenge to enterprise social media. They are actually responsible for the human resources to get the job done.”

25) “To overcome adoption hurdles, you have to make it easy to integrate social into the work employees are already doing. It can’t be a scary commitment – it has to be a natural extension of what you do. We have trained our employees to do their jobs with any eye toward social – If they admire a new product on our shelf, use a camera to give a visual image into the store and all that they love, Make it crazy easy to participate.”

Comments from the crowd?

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Businessprogram, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions. IBM had no editorial control of this content.

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